Can someone check the third-floor bathroom? says the chat.
Got it, I message back.
Kayla? I say, looking under the stall doors.
Another student, who is in my class and is standing at the mirror, motions to me. Last stall, she mouths.
I knock and Kayla opens the stall door slowly. I don’t know you, she says.
I don’t teach the tenth graders. I introduce myself, tell her what I teach.
I still have to pee, she says, closing the door.
I message the Google chat. Minutes pass and no sound comes from the stall. I watch the toes of her black lace-up shoes turn in.
She comes out and the toilet hasn’t flushed. She turns the water on and washes and rewashes and rewashes her hands.
Come on, Kayla, I say. We have to get you back to class.
She doesn’t look at me. She washes one more time and grabs a paper towel, placing it in between her fingers, folding it into a tiny dark-brown square before placing it into the trash.
We come out of the bathroom and I’m not sure if I’m allowed to touch her. I’m not sure how to make sure she doesn’t run away without my touching her. I try to keep my voice calm and not to scold her. I have to chat the counselor to find out where to take her and I type with one finger, keeping one hand free in case she runs. She’s taller than me but she stays half a step behind. Twice, she tries to turn back toward the bathroom and I grab hold of her backpack and half nudge, half lead her up the stairs.
What’s your favorite subject? I say, suddenly dumb and bad at conversation.
Science, she says.
Cool, I say. I like science.
She tries to take a sharp left when we get up the stairs and I turn right and once again I have to grab her backpack to keep her with me. She’s wily and she’s fast, they told us in the meeting. I loop my arm around hers.
Come back, Kayla, I say as I let go of her to knock on the counselor’s office door and she disappears down the hall.
She was just here, I say when the counselor comes out and Kayla’s gone.
* * *
I leave after my hall duty is over. I pass the twenty-four-year-old on the escalator. He goes up and I go down and I look him in the eye and do not smile and he finally looks away.
* * *
The shift in register between my day job and my night job usually takes half an hour. The students that I teach at night are grad students. They’re so much older, paying to be there. It is both more intellectually rigorous and not as hard for me because I don’t have to convince them they should care. Because their lives up until now have all been more like mine. I’m less careful with them maybe; their out-of-class demands feel both less important to me and easier to solve.
I sit in whatever office I am given and I disappear for an hour, as long as students haven’t asked to meet with me, and I read the book I’m meant to teach or I scroll through Twitter or text my husband and ask him to send me videos of our girls. I take off my blazer if I’ve been wearing a blazer. I have, twice this year, bought a T-shirt on the magic credit card after I looked in the mirror on my way uptown and felt too professionally dressed to teach literature to graduate students.
The Chilean writer is in her fifties, I learned from the link embedded in the earlier email form the school administration office, and has written five novels, three of them translated into English. She is on her second marriage, has one grown son. She sits next to me at the seminar table as we discuss Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., a novel that has attempted to absence words of their meaning. Before I entered the room, what was I? G. H. asks. Most of the students did not like it. I have told them that like and dislike are not pertinent but they are incapable of not telling everybody whether or not they liked each book we read. It’s a hard novel and it doesn’t give much space for the reader to feel grounded, to get inside it, I say. Why does it do this, though? I ask. I gesture too much when I teach. In the novel, a woman stands at the edge of a room and watches the slow death of the cockroach she’s decapitated with a door, talking with it, before ingesting its entrails.
A female student who wears dark eyeliner and has long curly hair raises her hand close to the end of class and says, of the experience of reading the novel, I felt hit by a truck. Some students laugh, and I say, So, then, she made you feel something. So, then, I say, did she succeed in that?
The Chilean writer stays quiet the whole time. She takes notes. She smiles and nods whenever I look toward her and when the student says the thing about the truck she laughs.
I’m so grateful, she says, after.
I smile at her, not sure how to tell her that she shouldn’t be.
Can I buy you dinner? she says.
I haven’t eaten, and the kids are already in bed sleeping.
Sure, I say.
* * *
We agree to split a cheeseburger. She says she can never finish one all by herself and, though I’m starving, haven’t eaten all day, I’m too thrilled by the suggested intimacy to refuse. She serves me, in a clutch, from her plate to mine, half of the French fries and we eat almost all of the food, not saying much, in not very long a time.
We talk at first about books and about teaching. I tell her I wanted to be an academic because books always made more sense to me than people, because words written down couldn’t be refuted later on. I’m always shocked, I tell her, when I see students outside of class and have to talk to them about anything but whatever we’ve read together, when I have to make up the ideas and the questions from scratch.
She says she became a writer because it was the only space in which she ever had control.
I wrote about real people, she tells me. Except I could do things to them, with them; I wasn’t ineffectual in the face of whatever wants or needs they had.
I forgot, she says, that the actual people would still be there, and the same, when I was done.
I like looking at her as she talks. We sit at a small table, in chairs with caned backs and thin red cushions. I want to take my shoes off, to pull my knees up to my chest. The tables are close to one another and when people get up on either side of us they have to hold their coats and bags up over their heads so they don’t brush against us as they walk past. The lighting’s dim and the walls are red to match the cushions. There are booths along both back walls and worn movie posters hung behind the bar, the titles of which are all in French.
I used to listen to my drunk sister, she says, on the phone for hours.
She talked about her awful life, she says, her bipolar, perennially out-of-work husband, her insane, drug-addled, Asperger’s, ADHD kids.
She chews a fry and smiles at me. I took notes, she says.
I eat the last bite of my cheeseburger. It’s too big a bite and I hold my hand over my mouth as she waits for me to speak and then goes on.
I always asked her, she says, if I could use it. Carla, I said, I’m going to use this in my work; is that okay?
The Chilean writer looks past me through the window to the street, where students walk past in clusters, where cabs and large, dark SUVs drive by.
She said yes every time, but she was drunk.
The waiter brings a second round of beers and I hold my thumb over the lip, not eager to drink it. I don’t like beer, really, but when she mentioned that the beer list looked good, I wanted to be like her, so I ordered what she got.